In the past, when a user desired to use new software, the user was required to go to a store, purchase the software, and install the software on the user's computer. If after the software was shipped, a bug was found, the user might be required to go to the vendor's website, find where a patch could be obtained, and download and apply the patch.
Today, some software is distributed over the Internet. If the software can be packaged in a small executable, a software vendor may choose to distribute the software over the Internet. Using this model, a user can browse to a vendor's Website, pay for software, and then download the software. This model has problems when the software requires a lot of disk space or when the user has an Internet connection with relatively low bandwidth. For example, with a computer with a 28.8 kilobits per second (Kbs) to the Internet, a CD's worth of software (650 Megabytes) would take over 50hours to download. Even with a 512 Kbs connection, downloading 650 Megabytes of software would take almost three hours—assuming that the connection remained up and delivered its full bandwidth.
The overall bandwidth of the Internet, however, continues to increase. In addition, increasingly more consumers are obtaining higher bandwidth connections to the Internet. Software developers and vendors would like to distribute their software directly to the consumers, but some problems remain.
One problem is how to distribute the software economically. For example, some Internet bandwidth providers charge a monthly fee based on peak bandwidth consumed at any time during the month. When a game or other software product is first released, millions of users might try to simultaneously download content associated with the game. This could cause a sharp peak in bandwidth usage and a consequently expensive monthly fee.
Other problems also exist that need to be addressed before software developers and distributors use the Internet to distribute full-scale software products.